>>712886772
One other thing no one likes to consider is that Bomberman has an infinitely high skill ceiling and is meant for competitive play, and while deceptively simple, Bomberman asks quite a bit of players in terms of full-board awareness and tracking lots of changing variables across the span of short 3-minute bouts.
It unironically filters retards because you can't break through beginner level play unless you have an IQ high enough to process the shit Bomberman demands.
Untrained eyes look at the game and just assume it's a simple "stay out of the fire" game when in reality Bomberman is an extremely accelerated strategy game with discrete early/mid/endgame phases, clear lines between stalemates and checkmates, clear distinctions between players of different skill levels, and hard checks on whether your skill is enough to survive at all. Yet it can still be played enjoyably as a party game much like Smash Bros due to the ostensible simplicity of its base mechanics.
Unfortunately a real metagame rarely has time to develop around any given Bomberman title because of high turnover (people getting filtered), not enough high-level players or ways to train high-level play, and a multitude of titles with no real unity between them. Power Bomberman is as close as we've gotten so far, but it would take Konami having some shred of respect for both the series and the players in order for an "official" Bomberman game to become a viable central hub where players can actually find decent matches and sharpen each other as steel unto steel.